Jane's Pick of the Day: 25 places to find instructional videos Recently I have received a number of emails asking about places that offer free instructional videos (on all subjects), so I thought I would put together a posting of the main ones that I know about: 5min Life Videopedia - instructional and how-to videos Academic Earth - Thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholarsblip.tv - next generation TV networkGoogle Video - videos on all topics Graspr - The instructional video network Howcast - How-to videos iCue - A fun, innovative, learning environment built around video from the NBC News ArchivesInstructables - Make, HowTo and DIY iTunes U - Faculty are using iTunes U to distribute digital lessons to their students, e.g Stangord, Trinity College Dublin, etc.
Mountain Lakes Curriculum I know that we educators love our acronyms, but perhaps I went to far with the title of this blog post. However, every time I sign a PO for a textbook order and I see the price, my stomach drops. That is why I am a fierce advocate for teachers to “Do It Yourself” and create their own textbook, especially now when there are so many “Open Educational Resources” or OER, out there. This post looks to highlight some of them already out there: The 15 best tools for data visualisation It's often said that data is the new world currency, and the web is the exchange bureau through which it's traded. As consumers, we're positively swimming in data; it's everywhere from labels on food packaging design to World Health Organisation reports. As a result, for the designer it's becoming increasingly difficult to present data in a way that stands out from the mass of competing data streams. Get Adobe Creative Cloud
How to Turn a Classroom Research Project into an Infographic Conveying information in a striking, concise way has never been more important, and infographics are the perfect pedagogical tool with which to do so. Below, you’ll find my experience with designing an infographic-friendly classroom research project, explained in a step-by-step process you can implement in your own classroom. Familiarize Students With the Infographic Concept Photo credit: visual.ly After hearing all the buzz about infographics in education, I thought I’d experiment with the concept in my seventh-grade accelerated English class. I wanted to ease my students into the idea, so we first spent time researching infographics — what they are, how they work, and what kind of information is best conveyed by the medium.
Hippocampus: Homework and Study Help Can I take a course at HippoCampus for credit? How do I enroll in a course at HippoCampus? Are there any fees to take your courses? How do I make a comment or ask a question? Literacy in the Digital Age: Five Sites With High-Quality Informational Text Editor’s Note: Teaching Channel has partnered with Student Achievement Partners on a blog series about digital literacy tools and their effective use by educators. One of the most exciting shifts in the Common Core State Standards is the increased use of content-rich, informational text. Let’s think about this. As professionals, how often do we read texts that are outside of our comfort zone? Perhaps it was a legal document, a lengthy contract, or 16th Century prose.
Fantastic Comprehensive List of Assessment Tools for Teachers About ETR Community EdTechReview (ETR) is a community of and for everyone involved in education technology to connect and collaborate both online and offline to discover, learn, utilize and share about the best ways technology can improve learning, teaching, and leading in the 21st century. EdTechReview spreads awareness on education technology and its role in 21st century education through best research and practices of using technology in education, and by facilitating events, training, professional development, and consultation in its adoption and implementation.
8 High-Quality OER Collections Resource Spotlight 8 High-Quality OER Collections Finding high-quality open educational resources used to be a challenge, but a number of curated OER collections have made the task much easier for educators. Here are eight sources that can help. 1. CK-12 Foundation Open Educational Resources (OER): Resource Roundup Resources by Topic: OER, a part of the global open content movement, are shared teaching, learning, and research resources available under legally recognized open licenses -- free for people to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. Why are OER important? High-quality OER can save teachers significant time and effort on resource development and advance student learning inside and outside the classroom.
Exploring Essential Questions with a Group of Objects By: Tess Porter, Educational Technician, Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access Trying to brainstorm your next Learning Lab collection, but not sure where to start? With a particular topic in mind, creating a large collection of objects and grounding them in a few guiding questions can be a great way to create a simple, investigative, multi-disciplinary, evidence-based, discussion-sparking collection for your students. This method is flexible, can be used with a wide variety of topics, and works best in a collection containing 20–50 objects. In this post, I'll describe some basic guidelines for creating a collection using this method, as well as examples of collections that I and other educators have built to inspire your own.
Generation Global: How Cross-Cultural Dialogue Builds Critical Thinking and Empathy The world and the people who work and live in it have become ever more connected as the internet becomes more accessible. Yet despite the ability to connect and learn about happenings on the other side of the globe, many communities have become more polarized and entrenched in a particular worldview. As these trends emerge, teachers are looking for ways to foster productive dialogue skills in today’s students — the generation that will have to deal with complex, increasingly global problems. Activities that connect students to peers in other countries have become more common in classrooms because it’s now possible. Decades ago students might have had an international penpal, now they can easily have digital penpals or video conference with students all over the world.
Instagram for Teachers If you already have a personal account and want to add another one to use professionally, go to your profile screen and click the Settings icon at the top right. Scroll to the bottom and click Add Account. Go through the steps of signing up.